How Do You Get Young Audiences to Watch Old Films? Locarno's Heritage Monday Tackles the Question

A panel at the 79th Locarno Film Festival asked a question that every archive, repertory cinema and classic-film streamer faces: how do you convince young people to watch films made before they were born?

The session was Heritage Monday, an annual fixture in Locarno's industry programme devoted to film restoration and retrospective programming. The 79th edition of the festival runs from 5 to 15 August 2026 in the Swiss lakeside town, and this year it also introduced a competitive section judged entirely by a jury of young people — a signal that the festival is putting its programming where its panel topics are (Instagram).

Heritage Monday pairs screenings of new restorations with panel discussions about the business and craft of keeping older films in circulation. The edition covered by Variety on 11 August 2026 zeroed in on the challenge of reaching new young audiences for older titles (Variety).

Moderating the panel was Sung Moon, a programmer at the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea (Screen Daily). Four speakers brought very different tools to the same problem.

Leslie Vuchot runs Timeless Cinema, an organisation in France devoted to promoting classic film, and also operates Le Lucernaire, a cinema in Paris. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus represented Arsenal Filminstitut, the Berlin-based institution known for its archive and experimental programming. Amy Homma came from the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the Academy Collection in Los Angeles. Eddie Muller, the Film Noir Foundation founder who hosts Turner Classic Movies' "Noir Alley" programme, rounded out the group with the perspective of a broadcaster and festival programmer who has brought school classes into his screenings (Variety).

The panel's examples ran from the playful to the star-powered. Homma described bringing a Dalmatian named Pogo to a screening of 101 Dalmatians, paired with an animator leading live-drawing classes for the audience — a hands-on approach aimed at children encountering a film for the first time. The Academy Museum has also invited Guillermo del Toro to give talks illustrated with materials from its archive, including a session on the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Muller's contribution was simpler and direct: put old films in front of students and let the work speak (Variety).

What ties these approaches together is a refusal to treat classic film as a sealed vault. The strategy, whether the tool is a dog, a drawing pad or an A-list director, is to build a bridge between the artefact and a viewer who has no built-in reason to care.

Heritage Monday also sits alongside a practical engine for preservation. The festival's Heritage Restoration Contest closed its 2026 call on 11 May, selecting one outstanding classic film for a complete restoration — the kind of work that keeps titles alive for the audiences these panels are trying to reach (Locarno Festival). The next Heritage Monday is scheduled for 10 August 2026 (Locarno Festival).